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Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Did Obama Do Enough to Stabalize the Housing Market

Today's article is reprinted with permission from CNNMoney. The original article was run on their site in January 2012.Meanwhile, the Raleigh Market is showing signs of improvement, and overall we were not hit as hard as the nation's other largest cities. Contact The Murray Group now for pre-approval on a new loan.

The president's efforts to revive the housing
market have largely failed. But is that entirely Obama's fault?

Experts say there wasn't much Obama could have done.

market was in far worse shape than anyone knew."

Obama took office in 2009, promising swift action to address the mortgage crisis. He quickly unveiled his signature foreclosure prevention program, known as HAMP, and his refinance program, known as HARP.
But
the HAMP program, which was designed to lower troubled borrowers'
mortgage rates to no more than 31% of their monthly income, ran into problems
almost immediately. Many lenders lost documents, and many borrowers
didn't qualify. Three years later, it has helped a scant 910,000
homeowners -- a far cry from the promised 4 million.

HARP, which
was intended to reach 5 million borrowers, has yielded about the same
results. Through October, when it was revamped and expanded, the program
had assisted 962,000.
Meanwhile, more than 3.5 million people
remain behind in their mortgage payments and more than 1.9 million homes
are in foreclosure. And home prices have fallen for six months
straight.

One
of the main problems with Obama's foreclosure prevention program was
that the housing crisis had already spiraled beyond unaffordable
mortgage rates. Homeowners were defaulting because they didn't have jobs
-- and the administration's effort did little to help them.

In response, Obama rolled out a multitude of initiatives designed to help the underwater and the unemployed. But few of them have had much impact.

"He
focused his gun in the wrong place," said Anthony Sanders, a real
estate finance professor at George Mason University. "The
administration's approach is to kick the can down the road. That doesn't
lead to a recovery and just strings the problem along."